The Disappointing Journey to Being ‘Just a Carer’

Abstract

I remember there was a time—an incident where this nurse was trying to find the vein of the client and she really pricked and pricked, and I could see the vein. And I was like, we do that in Zambia. But I can’t do anything about it here because I’m just a carer. They consider us as someone who doesn’t know anything.

This care assistant observed a nurse in her residential care home inserting a needle into a client’s arm to the point of causing him injury but was paralysed to intervene because she felt that she was viewed as ‘someone who doesn’t know anything.’ Her primary identity, as a nurse in Zambia, was overshadowed by her role of being ‘just a carer’ in England. Despite her extensive nursing knowledge, she was rendered helpless in England’s occupational hierarchy. Her silence was not self-imposed, however, for it was illegal for her to dispense medical advice. In another case, when a care assistant in a nursing home did offer guidance to a nurse who had forgotten the amount of medicine needed for a diabetic shot, she was told, ‘What do you know, you’re just a carer.’ These care assistants were heavily monitored and prevented from taking action in their institutionalized work settings. This schism in the care assistants’ private and public identities triggered internal crises in their retreat from the initial dreams that had inspired their migration.